Foul b'Laban (فول باللبن) is the fava bean stew finished with yogurt: warm mashed ful medames loosened and cooled by laban, scooped with bread or packed into it. Foul itself is the Lebanese breakfast workhorse, small dark fava beans simmered soft and crushed with lemon, garlic, and olive oil; the laban version takes that hot, dense, garlicky base and folds tangy yogurt through or over it. The angle is temperature and tang. Yogurt does two jobs at once here, cooling the beans from a heavy hot mash to something looser and lifting the whole thing with dairy sourness against the earthiness of the fava. Get the ratio right and it eats light and bright for such a humble base; get it wrong and you have either a curdled grey paste or a bland bean mush with a thin sour film on top.
The build starts with the foul and the foul starts with the bean. Dried or pre-cooked small fava beans are simmered until fully soft, then crushed, partly or fully, with the back of a spoon along with crushed garlic, lemon juice, salt, and a pour of olive oil, kept warm and loose rather than stiff. The defining move is the laban: thick yogurt, sometimes beaten with a little extra garlic and salt, either stirred through the warm beans so the whole bowl turns pale and creamy or spooned over the top as a distinct cool layer, depending on the kitchen. It is finished the standard way, a slick of olive oil, a dusting of cumin or paprika, chopped parsley, sometimes diced tomato and onion, and eaten by scooping with torn khubz or packed into a pita with the same garnishes for a hand-held version. Good execution shows beans that are soft and well seasoned underneath, yogurt that is fresh and thick enough to stay creamy rather than splitting against the warm beans, and a clear balance where the tang lifts the earthiness instead of burying it. Sloppy execution is undercooked chalky beans, yogurt added to beans too hot so it breaks into grainy curds, or so much laban that the fava flavor disappears entirely.
It varies by whether the yogurt is mixed in or layered on, by how hard the beans are mashed, and by how much garlic and lemon go in before the dairy. A fully stirred version is uniform, mild, and creamy; a layered version keeps a hot garlicky bean base under a cool tart cap and stays more dynamic per bite. Some kitchens push the garlic and lemon hard so the yogurt has something to balance; others keep it gentle. This laban form sits beside the olive-oil, egg, and hummus builds of foul as its own named version rather than a variant note on them, and each deserves its own treatment. What foul b'laban reliably delivers is the everyday fava base made lighter and tangier by yogurt, eaten warm with bread, earthy underneath and cool on top.